Contemporary sculptures on display alongside iconic classics

(By Elisa Cecchi)
(ANSA) - Rome, February 4 - Masterpieces by Italian-Swiss
sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) will feature
in an exhibit at Rome's Galleria Borghese opening on Wednesday
and continuing through May 25.

Bronzes by Giacometti, whose doubt-infused work fascinated
contemporary writers and artists ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre
to Pablo Picasso, will be shown alongside the Borghese Gallery's
permanent collection embracing Neoclassical sculptures like
Antonio Canova's Paolina and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Baroque
Apollo and Daphne as well as ancient Roman-Greek and Egyptian
statues.

"Giacometti: La scultura" was organized by the director of
the Roman museum Anna Coliva, and by Christian Klemm, one of the
leading experts on Giacometti and the author of a number of
monographs on the artist, who selected the 40 works of art and
studied their collocation beside the Villa's extraordinary
collection.

Giacometti earned a reputation in the early 1930s in Paris
through his erotic and ironic Surrealist figures.

After rejecting Surrealism, during and after the Second
World War, he started creating his stunning pole-like human
bodies widely perceived as metaphors for post-war trauma and
doubt.

The elusive charisma of Giacometti's work has influenced a
range of contemporary sculptors from David Smith to Mark di
Suvero, embodying a century of great political, historic and
cultural turmoil.

The tragic emphasis and poetry of his art is enhanced in
the exhibit by its juxtaposition with the permanent Borghese
collection, ranging from ancient Roman to Baroque sculptures,
including Bernini's powerful David.

The sensual shape of Giacometti's Femme couchée qui reve
(1929) can be admired alongside Canova's Paolina, whose gaze
stares towards the Tete qui regarde (1929), another early work
by Giacometti.

Visitors can imagine the heavy steps of Giacometti's Homme
qui marche (1947) and of Bernini's Aeneas as he makes arduous
progress while carrying Anchises.

The unstable balance of Homme qui chavire (1950) can be
compared to David's, also by Bernini, while the mysterious, dark
Femme qui marche (1932-1936) is on display in the equally
breath-taking Egyptian room.

Indeed, the artist's flattened heads and stark profiles are
often reminiscent of ancient Egyptian figures.

The 40 Giacometti works of art on display are a voyage
through his art's burning energy as he investigates the vital
depth of men and women by reducing the human body to its
essence.

Born in the Bergell Valley in Italian-speaking Switzerland
in 1901, Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922, when the art scene
was vibrant and wide open.
Paris was his home until his death in 1966, aged 64.

His Surrealist works in the 1930s are at once elegant and
perverse.
Sculptures like the Disagreable Objects are at once
aggressive and innocent, a reflection of the Surrealist
preoccupation with sexuality.

Giacometti's women are objects of desire yet dangerous
while the artist is also attracted to androgyny for its duality
- a metaphor for the totality of life.

In the exhibit, the tragic awareness of the potential
failures and frailty of mankind portrayed by Giacometti emerges
in stark contrast to the human greatness glorified by the
Borghese permanent collection.

The exhibit starts with the artist's late works including
Grand Femme Debout I (1960) and Homme qui marche I (1960) and
continues with the artist's 1920s works in the Canova room,
including Femme couchée qui reve (1929), Femme chouchée (1929)
and Homme (Apollon) (1929).

The Hermaphrodite Room hosts, among others, Femme Egorgée
(1932) while Portrait de Madina Visconti (1932) and Tete
d'Annette (1959) can be admired in the Vestibule.

The show ends in the Lanfranco Room with Giacometti's most
celebrated busts including his wife's Annette as, by the
mid-1950s, the artist increasingly focused on portraiture,
sculpting his family and immediate circle of friends, to
masterfully convey the psychological intensity of the human
face.